.

GODARD: And if you could replace all the images by sounds? I mean...I am thinking of a kind of inversion of the functions of the image and of the sound. One could have the images, of course, but it would be the sound that would be the significant element.

BRESSON: As to that, it is true that the ear is much more creative than the eye. The eye is lazy; the ear, on the contrary, invents. In any case, it is much more attentive, while the eye is content to receive-except in the rare cases when it invents, but then in fantasy. The ear is a much deeper sense, and very evocative. The whistle of a locomotive, for example, can evoke, imprint in you the vision of an entire railroad station, sometimes of a specific station that you know, sometimes of the atmosphere of a station, or of a railroad track, with a train stopped....The possible evoications are innumberable. What is good, too, with sound is that leaves the spectator free. And it is towards that that we should tend - to leave the spectator as free as possible.

Jean-Luc Godard & Robert Bresson

from an interview in Cahiers du cinema, 1967

as translated in Robert Bresson [ed. James Quandt]